Bentham Science Publishers is a company that publishes scientific, technical, and medical journals and e-books. It publishes 140 subscription-based academic journals[1] and over 60 open access journals.[2] It is based at Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates,[1] and has operating units in the United States, Japan, China, India, and the Netherlands. The company workforce is outsourced to China, India, Japan [3] and Pakistan.[1]

Bentham Open, its open-access branch, has received some criticism for its questionable peer-review practices, and was listed as a "potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publisher" in Jeffrey Beall's list of Predatory Publishers. [4]

Contents

Bentham Science has three main operating divisions: subscription-based journals, open access titles, and e-books. They publish research literature in all areas of science, medicine, technology, humanities, and social sciences, which is available in both electronic and print versions.

Bentham Open Access published more than 150 peer-reviewed, free-to-view online journals under Bentham Open. This imprint was identified as a potential predatory publisher by Jeffrey Beall.[5] Bentham has since reduced it's roster to 60 open access journals in an effort to narrow the focus of its operations and focus on the quality of its OA publications.

Bentham Open journals claim to employ peer review;[6] however, a fake paper that was generated using SCIgen in 2009 that was accepted for publication has cast doubt on this. The publisher contended that that the paper was never published and that the acceptance was an attempt to catch the author who submitted the paper. [7] Another SCIgen generated fake paper was submitted to the Open Software Engineering Journal as part of the same operation -- this paper was rejected by the publisher after peer review.[8][9][10]

Bentham Open has been accused of spamming scientists with invitations to become members of the editorial boards of its journals.[11] These emails also had prompted the SCIgen paper submission to the journal.[9] The emails sent by Bentham included invitations to the editorial board of subjects where the recipient had no expertise.[9] In consequence, some editors quit the collaboration with Bentham.[8][10]

In 2009, the Bentham Open Science journal The Open Chemical Physics Journal published a study contending dust from the World Trade Center attacks contained "active nanothermite",[12] a well known 9/11 conspiracy theory. Following publication, the journal's editor-in-chiefMarie-Paule Pileni resigned stating, "They have printed the article without my authorization… I have written to Bentham, that I withdraw myself from all activities with them".[13]

In a review of Bentham Open for The Charleston Advisor, Jeffrey Beall noted that "in many cases, Bentham Open journals publish articles that no legitimate peer-review journal would accept, and unconventional and nonconformist ideas are being presented in some of them as legitimate science." He concluded by stating that "the site has exploited the Open Access model for its own financial motives and flooded scholarly communication with a flurry of low quality and questionable research."[14] Beall has since added Bentham Open to his list of "Potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers".[5]

In 2013, The Open Bioactive Compounds Journal was one of the journals that accepted an obviously bogus paper submitted as part of the Who's Afraid of Peer Review? sting.[15] It has since been discontinued.[16]

In a 2017 study of invitation spam by predatory publishers, Bentham Open was one of the most frequent invitation spammers.[17]